The "I Don't Care If This Lives Or Dies" Approach To Gardening

Some of you may have recently heard me mention (more precisely seen me post or comment) that I have come to the conclusion that I hate gardening.  Don't get me wrong ... I love gardens.  I love looking at various flowers & picking them to put in my home.  I love the scent of flowers & of freshly tilled earth.  I love seeing the butterflies flying about.  I love eating fresh veges I've grown myself.  These things are great things!  It's the work involved in gardening itself that rubs me the wrong way.

You can see a photo of our front yard at the top of this blog.  This photo was taken the summer we moved here.  Since that time we've planted quite a few trees & bushes, made a few garden beds, & had professional landscaping ... which turned out to be poorly done ... around the foundation of the house.  You can only hook so many hoses together to water things.  For the rest you need to drag buckets of water (2 buckets at a time) here & there, there & here, to water them.  Since the summers have been pretty drought stricken these past 3 years you can imagine what we've been up against.

Gardening here means getting outside in the miserable, oppressive, never ending central Kentucky summer heat & humidity which seem to hang over us like a death shroud morning, noon, & night.   It means dealing with the miserable, oppressive, never ending central Kentucky sun beating down on you & from which you can find no escape.  It means battling the gigantic central Kentucky spiders ... mostly huge ugly brown things although there are a few menacing looking fat bodied black ones with white dots on their backs.  Then there are the black & yellow striped ones the size of a saucer who like to hide deep inside or back behind a plant & then terrorize you by charging out & coming at you like a semi zooming down the interstate.  It means wearing tennis shoes, long pants tucked into socks, long sleeved shirts tucked into pants, long sleeves tucked into gloves, & spraying or rubbing yourself profusely with some sort of Tick Away product which in the end doesn't keep any ticks away but instead is probably alternating the makeup of your cells in some freakish way.

John & I had quite a vision planned for this place ... the Hill botanical gardens.  Alas, it was not to be so.  In the summer of 2010 we got so tired of pulling weeds that multiplied like rabbits & lugging buckets of water hither & yon in the aforementioned miserable, oppressive, never ending central Kentucky summer heat & humidity that we gave up the fight.  One day while mowing the yard, disgusted with our unreached goal of gardening nirvana, I decided to just ride the mower over the rose garden.  The rose garden had grown so high with weeds that you couldn't even see the rose bushes anymore but I knew they were there.  It was very cathartic to hear the crunching of the rose bushes as I drove over them ... not once, not twice, but several times with the mower blades set at the lowest level.  I wanted to make sure those bushes where totally obliterated.  Imagine my surprise last spring when there they were ... 9 little rose bushes, healthy & happy, reaching toward the sun, growing like the weeds that had overpowered them the year before.  I was both surprised & horrified.  I mentally revisited all the places we've lived where I tried to grow beautiful rose bushes, babying them with special foods & soils, just to see them quickly wither & die.  Yet here in the devil's playground I totally ignored them ... mowed over them for pete's sake ... & they were flourishing.  I didn't let this deter me.  I did not want to deal with the never-ending water buckets & weeding in yes, that miserable, oppressive, never ending central Kentucky summer heat & humidity again, so once more I ignored the roses & mowed over them every time.  So now it's the spring of 2012 & do I need to tell you how these roses are once again mocking me?  Yep, they're out there ... healthier & more lush than any Jackson & Perkins award winner.  Argh!!!

Last summer my husband had a weak moment & bought 4 new rose bushes at a local nursery.  Impressively beautiful, fragrant things.  He brought them home in their pots, set them in the corner of the driveway, & that's where they are still.  Granted, it hasn't been a terribly cold or icy winter but since being put there they've gotten no care whatsoever.  I noticed today that all 4 of them look like they could take a best of show prize in a rose bush competition.

It's not just roses!  Last year we bought & planted some bee balm & a couple daylilies.  One pot of daylilies & one pot of bee balm actually had a few offshoot plants growing in with it so I removed them, placed them in small pots to grow a bit, & then ignored them.  They've been sitting on the back porch ... in total shade ... being ignored like the rose bushes.  I would sometimes look out the back door this past winter, see them sitting there & think of how I would be gathering up the pots in the spring & throwing them away, but no ... they are growing profusely. 

I don't know what to make of this.  Ignored things are flourishing all over the yard despite their neglect & even deliberate abuse.  Is there some sort of magical property in our heavy clay/rocky/grub infested soil that plants crave?  It's a mystery, that's for sure.  I know that in the past I've dumped gallons of weed killer on the weeds in the gardens but they don't die.  John & I look & marvel at how, only a few hours after dousing them with weed killer, these weeds look greener & healthier than they did before.

Since we are planning to sell the house we decided we couldn't let the the landscaped beds & flower beds be overgrown with weeds & likewise we couldn't let those rose bushes languish in their pots in the driveway.  This morning John & I ventured outside.  He spent time cutting back the decorative grasses & I worked on weeding a bit of the foundation beds.  It went surprisingly smoothly although tonight I feel like someone took me out & beat me with a baseball bat.  Unused muscles are unhappy muscles & they protest loudly when you make them do things they haven't done for a long time.  I must admit the beds look nicer without the weeds.  At least they won't scare away prospective buyers.  Thankfully no spiders or ticks were encountered (still in their winter slumber perhaps?) & I even found a strange thing growing among the weeds in one area which I realized was a peony that was planted last year & then withered & presumably died as fast as it was planted.  The lemon verbena bushes which the landscaper planted amazingly survived & are blooming & smelling sweet.  I cut a small bouquet of branches & brought them inside & I'll leave you with a photo of one of the blooms.  Still playing with my camera you know   : )